John Irving - Until I Find You

The issue of what Miss Wurtz would wear provided a down-to-earth return to the heart of the matter. Jack told her that Armani was dressing him for the Academy Awards. (They had called; he’d said okay. This was how it usually happened.)

“ Who is dressing you?” The Wurtz asked.

“Armani—the designer, Caroline. Different fashion designers dress the nominees and their guests for the Oscars. If there’s a particular designer you like, I’m sure I could arrange it. Or you could just wear something by Armani, too.”

“I think I’ll dress myself, if it’s all the same to you,” Miss Wurtz replied. “I have some perfectly lovely clothes your father bought for me. Naturally, William will be watching. He’ll be so proud of you! I wouldn’t want William to see me wearing a dress he didn’t choose for me, Jack.”

Well, there was a concept, too—namely, that Jack’s father would be watching. The Wurtz would be dressing for him !

“You’ll have to tell me who’s nominated for what,” Caroline was saying. “Then I’ll go see all the movies.”

Jack wondered how many Academy voters had the diligence of a third-grade teacher, but—when Jack would finally get to the Oscar-winning part of his life story—Dr. García would call the “diligence” detail an example of his interjecting too much.

Jack doubted that every film nominated for an Oscar was still playing in a theater in Toronto; quite possibly, not every film had ever played there. But he knew this wouldn’t deter Miss Wurtz from trying to see them all.

Jack almost called Leslie Oastler to thank her for suggesting The Wurtz as his date for the Academy Awards, but he didn’t want to risk getting Leslie’s blonde on the phone.

“Dolores,” he would be tempted to say to the bitch, “I wanted to alert you to a large package that’s coming your way—more of my clothes. If you or Leslie wouldn’t mind hanging them in my closet as soon as they arrive, I’d appreciate it. I wouldn’t want them to be wrinkled for my next visit.” Or words to that effect; naturally, Jack didn’t make the call. (Had she known, Dr. García would have been proud of him for exercising such restraint.)

The two-bedroom suite at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons, where Miramax put them up for the long Oscar weekend, was larger than Miss Wurtz’s apartment—or so she told Jack. There was even a piano, which Miss Wurtz liked to play in her Four Seasons white terry-cloth bathrobe. She claimed to know only hymns and the St. Hilda’s school songs, but her voice was pretty and she played well.

“Oh, I don’t play well—nothing like your father, who used to tease me,” she said. “William would say, ‘If you want to be even a bit more tentative, Caroline, you might try breathing on the keys instead of using your fingers.’ He could be funny, your father. I wish you’d tell me more about your trip, Jack. Why don’t you begin with Copenhagen? I’ve never been there.”

There were always a lot of parties prior to the Academy Awards. As a nondrinker escorting his third-grade teacher, a woman in her sixties, Jack didn’t think that he and Caroline were in step with the bacchanalian behavior of many of his colleagues in the industry. But they went to those parties where Jack’s absence would have been resented, even if they spent much of the time talking quietly to each other.

Having calmly described so many of the painful passages in his life to Dr. García, Jack found that he was in better control of himself while recounting to Miss Wurtz those discoveries he made in his return trip to the North Sea—beginning with the Ringhof family tragedy that Alice had engendered in Copenhagen, which Jack was able to relate in a deadpan narrative more closely resembling the written word than conversation. Not once did he raise his voice, nor did he shed a tear; Jack didn’t even blink.

“Goodness!” was all Miss Wurtz had to say in reply.

They were at an outdoor luncheon at Bob Bookman’s home. The screenwriters who were Jack’s (or Emma’s) principal competition in the Best Adapted Screenplay category that year were there—in addition to Jack, Bookman represented three of his fellow nominees. But there Jack was, in Bob Bookman’s garden, with his third-grade teacher—his father’s former lover—and Jack was back in those North Sea ports of call, telling Miss Wurtz what he had learned.

“Don’t downplay what happened in Stockholm, Jack—I mean just because it wasn’t as bad as what happened in Copenhagen,” Miss Wurtz would tell him later that same weekend. “And even if you had sex with someone in Oslo, please don’t spare me any details.”

He didn’t. (Dr. García had taught him not to spare her any details.) Jack found that he could actually talk his way through it—at least to as sympathetic a soul as Caroline Wurtz. Jack doubted that he would have been able to tell the North Sea story to Leslie Oastler and her unfriendly blonde—not without shedding a tear or two, or indulging in a little shouting. But he told Miss Wurtz everything about Copenhagen and Stockholm without batting an eye. He didn’t even hesitate when he got to Oslo. He didn’t want to be over-optimistic, but Jack thought that Dr. García’s therapy was working.

The Weinstein brothers were backing more than one Oscar-nominated film that year. The night before the Academy Awards, Miramax had a party at the Regent Beverly Wilshire. The anti-pornography people were protesting The Slush-Pile Reader outside the hotel. The film had an R rating; it wasn’t pornographic, but it was offensive to the anti-pornography people that Jack’s character (Jimmy Stronach, the porn star) was sympathetically portrayed. Those other characters in the film who were part of the porn industry were also sympathetic—chiefly Hank Long and Muffy; and Mildred “Milly” Ascheim made a cameo appearance as herself. Worse, from the point of view of the anti-pornography people, all the porn stars were portrayed as having normal lives—to the degree that so-called L.A. dysfunctional is normal, and Emma believed it was.

There were fewer than a dozen protesters outside the hotel, but the media gave them undue attention. There were usually the same small number of zealots every year—some of them protesting what Jack’s mother would have called “the deterioration of language” in movies in general. The anti-profanity people, the anti-pornography people—there would always be complainers with too much time on their hands. Jack thought that the best thing was to pay them no attention, but the media tended to inflate their importance and their numbers.

Miss Wurtz hadn’t noticed the protesters. When Wild Bill Vanvleck was ranting at the Miramax party about the anti-pornography people, Caroline clutched Jack’s arm and said anxiously: “There are protesters ? What are they protesting?”

“Pornography,” Jack said.

Miss Wurtz looked all around the room, as if there might be pornographic acts under way in their very midst and she had somehow mistaken them for more innocent forms of entertainment. Jack explained: “You know, Caroline—my character, Jimmy Stronach, is a porn star. I think that’s what they’re protesting.”

“Nonsense!” Miss Wurtz shouted. “I did not see a single reproductive organ in the film—not one penis or one female thingamajig !”

“A what ?” Wild Bill said, looking shocked.

“A vagina, ” Jack whispered to him.

“You shouldn’t say that word at a party,” Caroline said.

It soon became clear that The Wurtz had seen too many films in too short a period of time—as many as three a day for the past several weeks, or so she’d told Jack. Miss Wurtz had never seen so many movies in her life; they were all a blur. And this year’s films were mingled with movies she’d not seen since she was a child. To her, the recognizable celebrities at the party were not movie stars but the actual characters they’d played. Unfortunately, these movies had overlapped in her mind—to the extent that she’d merged the plots of several different films into one incomprehensible epic, in which virtually everyone she “recognized” at the Regent Beverly Wilshire had played a pivotal role.